Giuseppe Tartini
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Giuseppe Tartini. |
Giuseppe Tartini (
April 8,
1692 –
February 26,
1770) was an Italian
composer and
violinist.
Tartini was born in Pirano, a town on the peninsula of
Istria, in the
Republic of Venice (now
Piran,
Slovenia).
It appears Tartini's parents intended for him to become a
Franciscan priest, and in this way he received the basic musical training. He studied law at the
University of Padua, where he became very good at
fencing. After his father's death in
1710, he married
Elisabetta Premazone, a woman his father would have disapproved of because of her lower social class and age difference. Unfortunately, Elisabetta was a favorite of the powerful
Cardinal Cornaro, who promptly charged Tartini with abduction. Tartini fled Padua to go to the convent of St. Francis in
Assisi, where he could escape prosecution; while there he took up playing the violin.
There is a legend that when Giuseppe Tartini heard
Francesco Maria Veracini's playing in
1716, he was so impressed by it and so dissatisfied with his own skill, that he fled to
Ancona and locked himself away in a room to practice.
Tartini's skill improved tremendously and in
1721 he was appointed Kapellmeister at Il Santo in
Padua, with a contract that allowed him to play for other institutions if he wanted to.
In
1726 Tartini started a violin school which attracted students from all over Europe. Gradually Tartini became more interested in the theory of
harmony and
acoustics, and from
1750 to the end of his life he published various treatises.
Arguably Tartini's most famous work is the "
Devil's Trill sonata", a solo violin sonata that requires a number of technically demanding
double stop trills and is difficult even by modern standards (one myth has it that Tartini had
six digits on his left hand, making these trills easier for him to play). According to legend, Tartini was inspired to write the sonata by a dream in which the
Devil appeared at the foot of his bed playing the violin.
Almost all of Tartini's works are
violin concerti and
violin sonatas. Unlike most of his Italian contemporaries, Tartini wrote no operas and no church music whatsoever. Tartini's music is problematic to scholars and editors because Tartini never put dates on his manuscripts, and he also revised works that had been published or even finished years before, making it difficult to determine when a work was written, when it was revised and what the extent of those revisions were. The scholars
Minos Dounias and
Paul Brainard have attempted to divide Tartini's works into periods based entirely on the stylistic characteristics of the music.
In addition to his work as a composer, Tartini was a music theorist, of a very practical bent. He is credited with the discovery of
sum and difference tones, an acoustical phenomenon of particular utility on string instruments (intonation of double-stops can be judged by careful listening to the difference tone, the "
terzo suono"). He published his discoveries in a treatise
Trattato di musica secondo la vera scienza dell'armonia (Padua,
1754).
Luigi Dallapiccola wrote a piece called
Tartiniana based on themes by Tartini.
His home town, Piran, now has a statue of Tartini in its new public "square". The "square" is really circular and consists of the old, dating from Roman times, port. Silted up and obsolete, it was cleared of debris, filled and redeveloped. The project was featured in Urban Land magazine. One of the old stone warehouses is now the Hotel Giuseppe Tartini. His birthday is celebrated by a concert in the main town cathedral.
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Giuseppe Tartini Prominent Istrians at istrianet.org
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Ornamentation in Giuseppe Tartini's Traité des Agréments*
A Tartini Page with Partial Discography
